i? THE A -=... / . / . '-. :: ::: .:..- 'í' 1f, . .. ... I' /' .,____ _ : It.:: ml J\\\\ *...0 ..., 0 0 · \ "..". . . 0 " . THE TALK OF THE TOWN Notes and Comment T HE Mzrror these days is working the life out of a new alphabetical headline tag- JD, which stands for Juvenile Delinquent, or sometimes Juvenile Delinquency. "DA Raps Top JD," for example, means that the Dis- trict Attorne) expresses disapproval of an increase in you know what. It gave us a start to see the Times for April 24th carrYIng on page 1 an F.B.I. hand- out on JD that made only page 5 of the Mirror. (ì 7 0u probably know what F.B.I. stands for ) "Youths Charged wIth Nearly Half Major Crimes in '57, the F.B.I. Reports," part of the headline said. The Times story sup- ported the head with an explanation drawn from the F.B.I.'s annual survey of crime in the nation. If you took "group of serious crimes classified sepa- rately-murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny and auto theft," the F .B.l. re- ported, "those under 1 made up 47.2 per cent of persons arrested for such crimes. " " s I " d eparate y to us seeme to mean ". I " " b " w sIng y, or one y one. e were astonIshed that JDs had commItted 47.2 per cent of all murders, 47.2 per cent of all aggravated assaults, and the rest In the next paragraph, though, it developed that "separately" referred to "group of serious crimes," whIch was to be con- sidered separately from another group of (more, less, equally) serious crimes, not listed. In the group of serious crimes separatel} con idered as a group, the F.B.I. had taken the percentage of per- sons arrested for each type of crIme who were under eighteen, and then av- eraged all the percentages. Sixty-seven per cent of the persons arrested for auto theft during 1957, for example, were under eighteen. Auto theft is and has al- ways been a typIcally adolescent crime; adolescents take autos because they are too young to own any themselves or to have driving licenses, and in most cases the autos are found within a week. Thus the sixty-seven-per-cent figure is not very exciting news Six per cent of the persons arrested for murder were un- der eighteen. If you average 6 ï and 6, it IS plain that 36.5 per cent of the persons arrested for auto theft and mur- der considered separately as a group of serious crimes were under eIghteen. This sounds more ominous; the 36.5 might give the fast reader an impres- sion that one out of every three mur- ders, lIke one out of every three auto thefts, was commjtted by a JD. t\.ctu- ally, if you cut burglary-which tech- nically includes breaking into a locked summer house at the shore-larceny, and auto theft off the end of the sepa- rately considered group, the JDs come out inconspicuously. For instance, they have been arrested for 9 per cent of all aggravated assaults (which is far too much, of course), but tha t doesn't mdke as good a subhead as "nearl) hdlf." The fa c t s are disquieting enough; nobody has to improve on them with sta tIStICS. cotted an M.A.C. hearing on a horder kidnapping case, dnd then charged that Colonel Flint's findings were "in open contradiction to any objective exan1ination of the facts," and that he was obvIously a tool of Jordan. On Jul) 24, 1956, Flint and another U nited Ndtion ohserver attached to l\Jl.A.C. ran over a land mine planted h, one or the other of the nations under observation in the no man's land of Mount Scopus. Flint received a score of steel fragments in his body and spent half a year in the hospital Baseball um- pires get hit with pop bottles, at worst, and not as often as the funny papers say. Daddy-O K ENNETH REXROTH, the fifty-two- year-old poet, translator (modern Greek, ancient Greek, Latin, Span- ish, Chinese, Japanese), anthologist, painter (ab- stract), and critic (liter- ary, music), who has also been a hobo, range cook, horse wrangler, cabdriv- er, and sheepherder, was I born In South Bend, In- I diana, hut has lived for J much of the past thirty I years In San Francisco, where he has recently become a leader of that city's boiling poetry re- vival He has also helped found a poetry-read-to- jazz movement there, dnd the other day he opened in New York at the Five Spot Café, a home)' bar-and-grill at th e south end of Cooper Square, for a couple of weeks of readings with the Pepper Adams QUIntet. We had lunch with him on the day of hIs début, and found him a nervous, medIum-sized man with short gray hair, a short gray mustache, a towering forehead, and eyes that slope down like the sides of a sharply peaked roof when his face is in repose. He has O NE of the lea t grateful jobs in the world is to be a UnIted N 1.tlons military observer serving on M.A.C., th e Mixed Armistice Commission that referees, without any authorIty to enforce its decisions, action along the frontier between Israel and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. On April 24th, we read In the news- papers, the Jordanian representatives of M.A.C. walked out of a conference in Amman, charging that Lieutenant- Colonel George Flint, of the Royal Ca- nadian Army, "had come under Israeli influence." (Colonel Flint had refused to vote on a Jordanian complaint.) On November 26, 1957, the Israelis boy-